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The List webpage

The List concept was first introduced to me, in its full importance, by Dr John Whitman Ray, founder of Body Electronics. The following is based on an extract of his book The Laws of Perfection.

The basic concept of the List is that there are many aspects of our past life/lives, sleeping in our subconscious or unconscious minds, awaiting resolution. The fact that these things are incomplete and unmanifested represents a block in the flow of our outward-going creative energy. This often manifests as tensions in the muscles of the body, and as a lack of clarity mentally. The List is a way of prioritising and reminding ourselves repeatedly of these incomplete tasks, until we manifest them, as a creative act of resolution, in the world around us.

The items that we place on the List are not to be self-indulgent or involutionary in their nature. They are not meant to be frivolous irrelevant fancies, cravings and aversions. They are meant so that we may reach a point, eventually, of Karmic resolution. All that is incomplete, will be made complete, and we are at peace.

Grab a pen and paper and write down all your goals, and all your desires which are evolutionary in nature. Then write down all your responsibilities, which you must carefully consider, until you are CERTAIN that these are responsibilities that you have chosen, and not simply the expectations of others. To thine own heart be true.

Then write down all the incompleted tasks (fixing tools, home renovations, tidying floor of room, etc.) This portion of the list is often very extensive.

Then with tremendous self-honesty, even in the face of our deepest fears, we must write down all the areas which need making amends, and all the conflicts which we do not yet feel at peace about, as we have not exhausted all the possibilities that we could to resolve them. The other people with whom we have had the conflicts sometimes will not fill their lives with forgiveness and share it with others. If you have had a conflict with an unforgiving person, you will gain no benefit from punishing yourself for the rest of your life. First forgive yourself, then ask their forgiveness, if appropriate, or ask for their apology, if appropriate. The nature of the other person does not affect whether we have done everything within our power to resolve the situation. Once we have done everything in our power, then we can rest peacefully, and think of the other person lovingly, regardless of whether they have found peace and forgiveness in their heart or not.

This last section is very difficult, where we must deal with our own justifications for our past emotional reactivity, and our past irrational decisions never to speak again, never to love or trust again, or never to do this or that again. Eventually we can resolve all areas of disharmony, where we have not done what we require to do to feel peaceful about a past situation or relationship.

Goethe stated Great things are done in secret. There is much truth in this statement. When the accumulating energy for a task is dispersed on useless verbal chatter, and many are informed of a plan which you are about to enact, then everyone else's suggestions and criticisms can sometimes cloud your intent and ability to enact the task in question. For this reason, it may be best to only discuss the items on your List with those people directly concerned with the completion of that particular List item, or those you intuitively feel you should tell. In this way, responsibility of decision will be learned.

Now prioritise the List. The simple day to day tasks are written down the bottom of the List. This will involve rewriting the items on the List on a fresh sheet of paper. These simple day to day short-term tasks will be tasks which can be visualised clearly in advance. It is not that difficult, for example, to see the floor of a room clean and organised, in your mind, before you do it. So the items where we can see in our minds the end, from the beginning of the task, we place at the bottom of the list.

Then we work our way up the list, the tasks gradually becoming more and more complex, and more and more difficult to visualise. Also the further up the list we go, the longer term the goals become. This is often a very difficult task, as priorities need to be carefully weighed mentally. Finally we will have an end result, our first finished List.

Now, to use the List, every morning and evening, we can reread it, and cross off the items which are complete, reorder priorities which have changed, cross off items which now seem inappropriate, etc. After we complete a task on the List, we say and feel It is good, and we relax in the knowledge that that task is complete and we never need to think about it again. The self-acknowledgment at this point, is a very important pause, in which we build enthusiasm for the further completion of higher List items.

Gradually as the simpler tasks are complete, the previously indistinct fuzzy tasks midway up the list become easier to visualise, and we reach a point of mental clarity where we can see the end-point from the beginning, in these tasks also. Eventually we move our way up to the top of the List, and become more and more Karmically complete, and our lives become more and more in alignment with our higher principles.

For detailed information on the List, I refer people to the aforementioned book by Dr John Whitman Ray, where more details are covered, and a more in-depth understanding is given.